Why What Men Were Taught About Mental Health in Hong Kong Isn't Enough

Every June, men's mental health gets its moment. The LinkedIn posts go up. People share statistics about suicide rates and nod solemnly.

Then July comes, and nothing changes.

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At some point that corporate ladder you're climbing stops being ambition and becomes a trap.

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I'm a therapist in Hong Kong who works specifically with men. I know what it's like from the inside. Not just clinically. I've lived it. I get it because it was also my story.

Men's Mental Health Awareness Month Is June. But the Problem Is Year-Round.

Movember, held every November, and June's men's mental health awareness month both started the same way: raising attention for men's health, prostate cancer, testicular cancer, mental health. It's done real good. But awareness without access, without real conversation, without men actually getting support, means nothing.

Here's what the data actually says. Men are a lot less likely to seek mental health support than women. They're more likely to use alcohol, overwork, or go completely flat as a way of managing emotional pain. And in Hong Kong, they die by suicide at roughly twice the rate of women.

In Hong Kong, where the pressure to perform is baked into daily life, where showing weakness means losing face, where "I'm fine" is basically the default setting, none of that surprises me.

The problem isn't that men can't feel. It's that we were taught that feeling was the problem.

What We Were Taught

Think about the messages most men absorbed growing up. Not from one big conversation, but from a thousand small ones. From media. From movies. From your family. From the football pitch.

Don't cry. You were told this before you could even read.

Man up. Said after falls, failures, heartbreak, losses, as if "manning up" is a strategy, not a form of suppression.

Figure it out yourself. Independence made into such a virtue that asking for help became a character flaw.

Don't show weakness. In sports, in school, in relationships, in boardrooms, in bedrooms. Especially in Hong Kong, where losing face carries a weight that's genuinely hard to explain if you didn't grow up here.

Be the provider. Stay in control. Always win.

None of these messages came from bad people. Most of them came from men, and women, who received the exact same messages and passed on what they knew. My parents did it to protect me. That's how it works. It gets handed down, generation to generation, and nobody questions it because it's just "how things are."

But those ideas don't just shape how you handle your emotions. They shape how you treat the people around you. If you recognise yourself in the performance identity trap, the provider, the guy who's always in control, you're not imagining it. That's the script talking.

What Happens to the Stuff That Has Nowhere to Go

When emotions don't have a healthy outlet, they find an unhealthy one. Every time. No exceptions. Anger is the easy default for most men.

I see this constantly in my practice. Men who don't know they're anxious but have been snapping at their partners for months. Men who don't recognise depression because for them it doesn't look like sadness, it looks like flatness. Like going through the motions. Like being present in the room but not mentally there.

Men who are drinking three whiskeys to sleep. Who go completely cold when someone tries to get close. Whose kids feel like they have a father who's technically there but emotionally gone. If any of that sounds familiar, men's anger and male loneliness usually aren't two separate problems. They're the same one wearing different clothes.

The anger. The overworking. The controlling behaviour. The emotional unavailability. The inability to be in the room with the people you love without being somewhere else in your head. These aren't character flaws. They're symptoms of unprocessed emotional pain that was never given anywhere to go.

That doesn't let anyone off the hook for how they've treated people. We're still responsible for our actions. But understanding why you do something is usually the first step to actually doing something different.

My Own Story

I spent years not asking for help about things I should have asked for help with a long time ago. I came up in corporate: twenty years of marketing, global companies, high-pressure environments. I knew how to perform. I knew how to keep it together. I was genuinely good at it.

I was less good at knowing what the hell was actually going on inside my head.

For a long time I had a massive problem with public speaking. It started back in seventh grade debate class. The teacher called me up, I froze, the anxiety hit, and twenty years of fear followed that one moment. I read books, went to doctors, tried group support. Tried to figure out what was going on in my head.

Did I ask for real help? No. Not for way longer than I should have.

Because men don't do that. Because I thought I should be able to figure it out alone. Because "going to therapy" felt like something other people needed. It's a big part of why men don't ask for help even when they know something's wrong.

That story has a different ending now. But I still think about the years I spent white-knuckling it instead of actually dealing with it.

I became a therapist, partly because of that. And I work specifically with men in Hong Kong because I understand how hard it is to walk through that door.

The Hong Kong Layer: Face, Filial Piety, and the Cross-Cultural Household

Everything above lands differently depending on which Hong Kong you're standing in, and most of my clients are standing in more than one at once.

For HK-Chinese men, the messages above get an extra layer. Depression or anxiety doesn't just look like weakness, it looks like a failure of face: a private problem made unforgivably public. Add filial piety on top of that. Being a "good son" means providing financially, choosing the "right" career, marrying the "right" way, and putting your parents' expectations ahead of your own exhaustion. I've sat with men who are drowning under that pressure and still show up to family dinner performing "fine," because the alternative feels like letting the whole family down.

For expat men here, the pressure looks different but lands just as hard: the isolation of building a life somewhere you don't fully belong, the loneliness of a social scene built on revolving expat friendships, and the same old training that therapy is for other people.

And then there's the household in between. I work with a lot of mixed marriages, HK-Chinese husband and expat wife, or the reverse, and there's a pattern I see constantly: she notices first. She's the one who says "something's off with him" months before he'd ever say it about himself. That's not nagging, by the way. That's often the first honest read of what's actually happening, and it deserves to be taken seriously instead of waved off as cultural misunderstanding.

What Men Actually Come to Me For

The men who come to me are mostly high functioning guys, but something is off. They feel it, but they don't always know exactly what to call it or what to do about it.

• They feel disconnected
• They're doing well at work but going through the motions
• They're angry all the time
• They've never processed trauma or grief
• They've been simmering under the surface, sometimes boiling over

It's normal. It's what we were handed. It's what was expected. It's how we were taught to deal with it.

The video up top gets at this exact pattern, the three things career-stressed men actually say before they'll admit something's wrong.

More on men's issues at Mindora.

What Actually Helps

Might as well give this a shot. What do you have to lose? You've read this far.

1. Start the conversation. With a therapist, yes, but even just with yourself. Name what's actually going on. A lot of men have never said the thing out loud, even internally.
2. Find a therapist who works specifically with men. Not all therapists do. The dynamics are different: how men communicate, what they respond to, the patterns that show up. Work with someone who gets it.
3. Understand the pattern before you try to change the behaviour. Anger management without understanding what's driving the anger is just lid-tightening. Therapy gets underneath it.
4. Stop waiting until it's bad enough. You don't have to be falling apart to benefit. You just have to be honest about what it's costing you to keep carrying it alone.
5. Be honest with the people around you. Not a TED Talk. Just a conversation. "I've been struggling with X" goes further than another year of pretending you're fine.

To the Men in Hong Kong Reading This

If something in this post landed, if there was a moment where you thought yeah, that's me, that's worth paying attention to.

You've probably been managing fine. You've probably kept it together. Maybe you've kept it together for years. But managing isn't the same as living. And keeping it together is fckn exhausting.

Men's Mental Health Month is June. But if you're reading this in February, or July, or at 1am on a Tuesday, it doesn't matter. Give me a call.

I offer a free 20-minute consultation. No commitment, no intake form that takes an hour, no judgment. Just a real conversation with someone who's worked through his own version of this and knows what the path looks like.

Book your free 20-min consult →